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THE IRON WOMAN

BY

MARGARET DELAND

"_This was the iniquity ... fulness of bread, and abundance of
idleness...._"--EZEKIEL, xvi., 49



TO MY

PATIENT, RUTHLESS, INSPIRING CRITIC LORIN DELAND

August 12, 1911



ILLUSTRATIONS

"LOOK!"
"BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"
"I THINK YOU ARE REASONABLE ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US"
"ELIZABETH, MARRY ME!"
"OF COURSE YOU KNOW MY OPINION OF YOU"
SHE WHEELED ABOUT, AND STOOD, SWAYING WITH FRIGHT
"WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?"
CLUTCHING HER SHOULDER, SHE LOOKED HARD INTO THE YOUNGER
WOMAN'S FACE



THE IRON WOMAN




CHAPTER I

"Climb up in this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson
commanded. She herself had climbed to the lowest branch of an
apple-tree in the Maitland orchard, and sat there, swinging her
white-stockinged legs so recklessly that the three children whom
she had summoned to her side, backed away for safety. "If you
don't," she said, looking down at them, "I'm afraid, perhaps,
maybe, I'll get mad."

Her foreboding was tempered by a giggle and by the deepening
dimple in her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of
impersonal regret at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It
would be too bad if I got mad, wouldn't it?" she said
thoughtfully. The others looked at one another in consternation.
They knew so well what it meant to have Elizabeth "mad," that
Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little group, said at once,
helplessly, "Well."

Nannie was always helpless with Elizabeth, just as she was
helpless with her half-brother, Blair, though she was ten and
Elizabeth and Blair were only eight; but how could a little girl
like Nannie be anything but helpless before a brother whom she
adored, and a wonderful being like Elizabeth?--Elizabeth! who
always knew exactly what she wanted to do, and who instantly "got
mad," if you wouldn't say you'd do it, too; got mad, and then
repented, and hugged you and kissed you, and actually cried (or
got mad again), if you refused to accept as a sign of your
forgiveness her new slate-pencil, decorated with strips of red-
and-white paper just like a little barber's pole! No wonder
Nannie, timid and good-natured, was helpless before such a sweet,
furious little creature! Blair had more backbone than his sister,
but even he felt Elizabeth's heel upon his neck. David Richie, a
silent, candid, very stubborn small boy, was, after a momentary
struggle, as meek as the rest of them. Now, when she commanded
them all to climb, it was David who demurred, because, he said,
he spoke first for Indians tomahawking you in the back parlor.

"Very well!" said the despot; "play your old Indians! I'll never
speak to any of you again as long as I live!"

"I've got on my new pants," David objected.

"Take 'em off!" said Elizabeth. And there is no knowing what
might have happened if the decorous Nannie had not come to the
rescue.

"That's not proper to do out-of-doors; and Miss White says not to
say 'pants.'"

Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "Maybe it isn't proper," she
admitted; "but David, honest, I took a hate to being tommy-hocked
the last time we played it; so please, _dear_ David! If
you'll play house in the tree, I'll give you a piece of my
taffy." She took a little sticky package out of her pocket and
licked her lips to indicate its contents;--David yielded,
shinning up the trunk of the tree, indifferent to the trousers,
which had been on his mind ever since he had put them on his
legs.

Blair followed him, but Nannie squatted on the ground content to
merely look at the courageous three.

"Come on up," said Elizabeth. Nannie shook her little blond head.
At which the others burst into a shrill chorus: "'Fraid-cat!
'fraid-cat! 'fraid-cat!" Nannie smiled placidly; it never
occurred to her to deny such an obviously truthful title.
"Blair," she said, continuing a conversation interrupted by
Elizabeth's determination to climb, "Blair, _why_ do you say
things that make Mamma mad? What's the sense? If it makes her mad
for you to say things are ugly, why do you?"

"'Cause," Blair said briefly. Even at eight Blair disliked both
explanations and decisions, and his slave and half-sister rarely
pressed for either. With the exception of his mother, whose
absorption in business had never given her time to get acquainted
with him, most of the people about Blair were his slaves.
Elizabeth's governess, Miss White--called by Elizabeth, for
reasons of her own, "Cherry-pie"--had completely surrendered to
his brown eyes; the men in the Maitland Works toadied to him;
David Richie blustered, perhaps, but always gave in to him; in
his own home, Harris, who was a cross between a butler and a
maid-of-all-work, adored him to the point of letting him make
candy on the kitchen stove--probably the greatest expression of
affection possible to the kitchen; in fact, little Elizabeth
Ferguson was the only person in his world who did not knuckle
down to this pleasant and lovable child. But then, Elizabeth
never knuckled down to anybody! Certainly not to kind old Cherry-
pie, whose timid upper lip quivered like a rabbit's when she was
obliged to repeat to her darling some new rule of Robert
Ferguson's for his niece's upbringing; nor did she knuckle down
to her uncle;--she even declared she was not at all afraid of
him! This was almost unbelievable to the others, who scattered
like robins if they heard his step. And she had greater courage
than this; she had, in fact, audacity! for she said she was
willing--this the others told each other in awed tones--she said
she had "just as lieves" walk right up and speak to Mrs. Maitland
herself, and ask her for twenty cents so she could treat the
whole crowd to ice-cream! That is, she would just as lieves,
_if she should happen to want to_. Now, as she sat in the
apple-tree swinging her legs and sharing her taffy, it occurred
to her to mention, apropos of nothing, her opinion of Mrs.
Maitland's looks:

"I like Blair's mother best; but David's mother is prettier than
Blair's mother."

"It isn't polite to brag on mothers," said David, surveying his
new trousers complacently, "but I know what I think."

Blair, jouncing up and down on his branch, agreed with unoffended
candor. "'Course she's prettier. Anybody is. Mother's ugly."

"It isn't right to say things like that out of the family,"
Nannie observed.

"This _is_ the family. You're going to marry David, and I'm
going to marry Elizabeth. And I'm going to be awfully rich; and
I'll give all you children a lot of money. Jimmy Sullivan--he's a
friend of mine; I got acquainted with him yesterday, and he's the
biggest puddler in our Works. Jimmie said, 'You're the only son,'
he said, 'you'll get it all.' 'Course I told him I'd give him
some," said Blair.

At this moment Elizabeth was moved to catch David round the neck,
and give him a loud kiss on his left ear. David sighed. "You may
kiss me," he said patiently; "but I'd rather you'd tell me when
you want to. You knocked off my cap."

"Say, David," Nannie said, flinging his cap up to him, "Blair can
stand on his head and count five. You can't."

At this David's usual admiration for Blair suffered an eclipse;
he grew very red, then exploded: "I--I--I've had mumps, and I
have two warts, and Blair hasn't. And I have a real dining-room
at my house, and Blair hasn't!"

Nannie flew to the rescue: "You haven't got a real mother. You
are only an adopted."

"Well, what are you?" David said, angrily; "you're nothing but a
Step."

"I haven't got any kind of a mother," Elizabeth said, with
complacent melancholy.

"Stop fighting," Blair commanded amiably; "David is right; we
have a pigsty of a dining-room at our house." He paused to bend
over and touch with an ecstatic finger a flake of lichen covering
with its serpent green the damp, black bark in the crotch of the
old tree. "Isn't that pretty?" he said.

"You ought not to say things about our house," Nannie reproved
him. As Blair used to say when he grew up, "Nannie was born
proper."

"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our
house. They've got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don't
have old desks round, the way we do."

It was in the late sixties that these children played in the
apple-tree and arranged their conjugal future; at that time the
Maitland house was indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly."
Twenty years before, its gardens and meadows had stretched over
to the river; but the estate had long ago come down in size and
gone up in dollars. Now, there was scarcely an acre of sooty
green left, and it was pressed upon by the yards of the Maitland
Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks. Grading had left
the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above the level of
a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally fetlock-deep
in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly paved
sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a
row of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with
innumerable gray cocoons. (Blair and David made constant and
furtive attempts to lift these spears, socketed in crumbling lead
in the granite base, for of course there could be nothing better
for fighting Indians than a real iron spear.) The orchard behind
the house had been cut in two by a spur track, which brought
jolting gondola cars piled with red ore down to the furnace. The
half dozen apple-trees that were left stretched gaunt arms over
sour, grassless earth; they put out faint flakes of blossoms in
the early spring, and then a fleeting show of greenness, which in
a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all semblance of
foliage. But all the same the children found it a delightful
place to play, although Blair sometimes said sullenly that it was
"ugly." Blair hated ugly things, and, poor child! he was assailed
by ugliness on every side. The queer, disorderly dining-room, in
which for reasons of her own Mrs. Maitland transacted so much of
her business that it had become for all practical purposes an
office of her Works, was perhaps the "ugliest" thing in the world
to the little boy.

"Why don't we have a real dining-room?" he said once; "why do we
have to eat in a office?"

"We'll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient," his mother
told him, looking at him over her newspaper, which was propped
against a silver coffee-urn that had found a clear space on a
breakfast table cluttered with papers and ledgers.

"They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at David's house,"
the little boy complained; "I don't see why we can't."

"I don't eat flowers," Mrs. Maitland said grimly.

"I don't eat papers," Blair said, under his breath; and his
mother looked at him helplessly. How is one to reply to a child
of eight who makes remarks of this kind? Mrs. Maitland did not
know; it was one of the many things she did not know in relation
to her son; for at that time she loved him with her mind rather
than her body, so she had none of those soft intuitions and
persuasions of the flesh which instruct most mothers. In her
perplexity she expressed the sarcastic anger one might vent upon
an equal under the same circumstances:

"You'd eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, if it
wasn't for the 'papers,' as you call 'em, in this house!" But it
was no wonder that Blair called it ugly--the house, the orchard,
the Works--even his mother, in her rusty black alpaca dress,
sitting at her desk in the big, dingy dining-room, driving her
body and soul, and the bodies and souls of her workmen--all for
the sake of the little, shrinking boy, who wanted a bunch of
flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And poor little
proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to make
peace. Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course
she was too young when her father married his second wife to
puzzle over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a
mild, vague young widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and
was as unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an
iron-works was a matter of inheritance--why such a man wanted to
marry Miss Sarah Blair was beyond anybody's wisdom. It is
conceivable, indeed, that he did not want to.

There were rumors that after the death of Nannie's mother,
Herbert Maitland had been inclined to look for consolation to a
certain Miss Molly Wharton (she that afterward married another
widower, Henry Knight); and everybody thought Miss Molly was
willing to smile upon him. Be that as it may, he suddenly found
himself the husband of his late partner's daughter, a woman eight
years older than he, and at least four inches taller; a silent,
plain woman, of devastating common sense, who contradicted all
those femininities and soft lovelinesses so characteristic, not
only of his first wife but of pretty Molly Wharton also.

John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an
uneducated, extremely intelligent man, had risen from puddling to
partnership in the Maitland Works. There had been no social
relations between Mr. Maitland, Sr., and this new member of the
firm, but the older man had a very intimate respect, and even
admiration for John Blair. When he came to die he confided his
son's interests to his partner with absolute confidence that they
would be safe. "Herbert has no gumption, John," he said; "he
wants to be an 'artist.' You've got to look after him." "I will,
Mr. Maitland, I will," said John Blair, snuffling and blowing his
nose on a big red pocket-handkerchief. He did look after him. He
put Herbert's affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to
his daughter, who in business matters was, curiously enough, his
right-hand man, that "Maitland's boy" was always, as he expressed
it, "to have the inside track."

"I ain't bothering about you, Sally; I'll leave you enough. And
if I didn't, you could scratch gravel for yourself. But
Maitland's boy ain't our kind. He must be taken care of."

When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness to his
wishes made his Sally "take care" of Herbert Maitland by marrying
him. "His child certainly does need a mother," she thought;--"an
intelligent mother, not a goose." By and by she told Herbert of
his child's need; or at any rate helped him to infer it. And
somehow, before he knew it, he married her. By inheritance they
owned the Works between them; so really their marriage was, as
the bride expressed it, "a very sensible arrangement"; and any
sensible arrangement appealed to John Blair's daughter. But after
a breathless six months of partnership--in business if in nothing
else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year-
old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was
ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption
could take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened
him and dazed him that there was nothing for him to do but die--
so that there might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she
loved him; nobody who saw her in those first silent, agonized
months could doubt that she loved him. Her pain expressed itself,
not in moans or tears or physical prostration, but in work. Work,
which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under like
circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as
Mrs. Maitland's religion had never been more than church-going
and contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help
under the strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate
the other means of consolation, she turned to work. She worked
herself numb; very likely she had hours when she did not feel her
loss. But she did not feel anything else. Not even her baby's
little clinging hands, or his milky lips at her breast. She did
her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of
him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to nurse him.
She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naive conviction
of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, she
began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her
shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever
since it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited
trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and
felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty
without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as
maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and
in the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering
woman seemed to have nothing but duty to offer to her child.
Nannie's puzzles began then. "Why don't Mamma hug my baby
brother?" she used to ask the nurse, who had no explanation to
offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his
eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his
service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three years
old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's
maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by
the boy's shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was
chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the
hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of
his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single
word "uggy," accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother.
Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of those people who cannot,
or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He
would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious
tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy
black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!" at
which she would push him roughly from her knee, and fall into
hurt silence. Once, when he was five years old, she came in to
dinner hot from a morning in the Works, her moist forehead grimy
with dust, and bent over to kiss him; at which the little boy
wrinkled up his nose and turned his face aside.

"What's the matter?" his mother said; and called sharply to the
nurse: "I won't have any highfalutin' business in this boy! Get
it out of him." Then resolutely she took Blair's little chin in
her hand--a big, beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and
blackened nails--and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her
cheek roughly against his. "Get over your airs!" she said, and
sat down and ate her dinner without another word to Blair or any
one else. But the next day, as if to purchase the kiss he would
not give, she told him he was to have an "allowance." The word
had no meaning to the little fellow, until she showed him two
bright new dollars and said he could buy candy with them; then
his brown eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at
that moment that money began to mean something to him. He bought
the candy, which he divided with Nannie, and he bought also a
present for his mother,--a bottle of cologne, with a tiny
calendar tied around its neck by a red ribbon. "The ribbon is
pretty," he explained shyly. She was so pleased that she
instantly gave him another dollar, and then put the long green
bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his
photographs.

In the days when the four children played in the orchard, and had
lessons with Miss White, in the school-room in Mr. Ferguson's
garret, and were "treated" by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream--
even in those days Mercer was showing signs of what it was
ultimately to become: the apotheosis of materialism and
vulgarity. Iron was entering into its soul. It thought extremely
well of itself; when a new mill was built, or a new furnace blown
in, it thought still better of itself. It prided itself upon its
growth; in fact, its complacency, its ugliness and its size kept
pace with one another.

"Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her general
manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; "and look at our churches! We have
more churches for our size than any town west of the
Alleghanies."

"We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson
retorted, grimly.

Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was full of pride.
"You just wait! We'll be the most important city in this country
yet, because we will hold the commerce of the world right here in
our mills!" She put out her great open palm, and slowly closed
the strong, beautiful fingers into a gripping fist. "The commerce
of the world, right _here!" she said, thrusting the clenched
hand, that quivered a little, almost into his face.

Robert Ferguson snorted. He was a melancholy man, with thin,
bitterly sensitive lips, and kind eyes that were curiously
magnified by gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he had a way of
knocking off with disconcerting suddenness. He did not, he
declared, trust anybody. "What's the use?" he said; "you only get
your face slapped!" For his part, he believed the Eleventh
Commandment was, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, because
he'll get it."

"Read your Bible!" Mrs. Maitland retorted; "then you'll know
enough to call it a Beatitude, not a Commandment."

Mr. Ferguson snorted again. "Bible? It's all I can do to get time
to read my paper. I'm worked to death," he reproached her. But in
spite of being worked to death he always found time on summer
evenings to weed the garden in his back yard, or on winter
mornings to feed a flock of Mercer's sooty pigeons; and he had
been known to walk all over town to find a particular remedy for
a sick child of one of his molders. To be sure he alleged, when
Mrs. Maitland accused him of kindness, that, as far as the child
was concerned, he was a fool for his pains, because human
critters ("I'm one of 'em myself,") were a bad lot and it would
be a good thing if they all died young!

"Oh, you have a fine bark, friend Ferguson," she said, "but when
it comes to a bite, I guess most folks get a kiss from you."

"Kiss?" said Robert Ferguson, horrified; "not much!"

They were very good friends, these two, each growling at,
disapproving of, and completely trusting the other. Mrs.
Maitland's chief disapproval of her superintendent--for her
reproaches about his bark were really expressions of admiration--
her serious disapproval was based on the fact that, when the
season permitted, he broke the Sabbath by grubbing in his garden,
instead of going to church. A grape-arbor ran the length of this
garden, and in August the Isabellas, filmed with soot, had a
flavor, Robert Ferguson thought, finer than could be found in any
of the vineyards lying in the hot sunshine on the banks of the
river, far out of reach of Mercer's smoke. There was a flagstone
path around the arbor, and then borders of perennials against
brick walls thick with ivy or hidden by trellised peach-trees.
All summer long bees came to murmur among the flowers, and every
breeze that blew over them carried some sweetness to the hot and
tired streets outside. It was a spot of perfume and peace, and it
was no wonder that the hard-working, sad-eyed man liked to spend
his Sundays in it. But "remembering the Sabbath" was his
employer's strong point. Mrs. Maitland kept the Fourth
Commandment with passion. Her Sundays, dividing each six days of
extraordinary activity, were arid stretches of the unspeakable
dullness of idleness. When Blair grew up he used to look back at
those Sundays and shudder. There was church and Sunday-school in
the morning, then a cold dinner, for cold roast beef was Mrs.
Maitland's symbol of Sabbatical holiness. Then an endless, vacant
afternoon, spent always indoors. Certain small, pious books were
permitted the two children--_Little Henry and His Bearer, The
Ministering Children_, and like moral food; but no games, no
walks, no playing in the orchard. Silence and weary idleness and
Little Henry's holy arrogances. Though the day must have been as
dreary to Mrs. Maitland as it was to her son and daughter, she
never winced. She sat in the parlor, dressed in black silk, and
read _The Presbyterian_ and the Bible. She never allowed
herself to look at her desk in the dining-room, or even at her
knitting, which on week-days when she had no work to do was a
great resource; she looked at the clock a good deal, and
sometimes she sighed, then applied herself to _The
Presbyterian_. She went to bed at half-past seven as against
eleven or twelve on other nights, first reading, with
extraordinary rapidity, her "Chapter." Mrs. Maitland had a
"system" by which she was able to read the Bible through once a
year. She frequently recommended it to her superintendent; to her
way of thinking such reading was accounted to her as
righteousness.

Refreshed by a somnolent Sunday, she would rush furiously into
business on Monday morning, and Mr. Robert Ferguson, who never
went to church, followed in her wake, doing her bidding with grim
and admiring thoroughness. If not "worked to death," he was, at
any rate, absorbed in her affairs. Even when he went home at
night, and, on summer evenings, fell to grubbing in his narrow
back yard, where his niece "helped" him by pushing a little
wheelbarrow over the mossy flagstones,--even then he did not
dismiss Mrs. Maitland's business from his mind. He was scrupulous
to say, as he picked up the weeds scattered from the wheelbarrow,
"Have you been a good little girl to-day, Elizabeth?" but all the
while, in his own thoughts he was going over matters at the
Works. On Sundays he managed to get far enough away from business
to interrogate Miss White about his niece:

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